Hydrocarbon conversions and particularly the reactions of olefins constitute a very important section of the organic chemistry. The 1-olefins can be polymerized to high polymers, they can be alkylated to high octane fuels and they can be oligomerized to oils.
Lubricating oils have been refined in recent years to match the increasing demands concerning their performance. Not only many additives have been developed for lubricating oils, but also entirely synthetic oils have been produced which exhibit special properties not found in oils produced from crude petroleum alone.
One of the key features in many chemical reactions is the desired purity of the end product. This feature is particularly difficult to achieve in hydrocarbon conversion reactions. The larger the hydrocarbon molecules are, the more difficult it becomes to perform a reaction with only one or two reaction products resulting therefrom. Particularly, lproducing a hydrocarbon oil with a well defined molecular weight and structure is a continuing goal in the petrochemical industry. Such pure oils can then be used as such or blended into other mixtures with reproducible and reliable properties.
Among the known hydrocarbon conversion reactions, dimerization is of particular interest here. Furthermore, the disproportionation (metathesis) reactions are important for this invention.
Olefin oligomerization and particularly dimerization reactions are well known in the art. These reactions start from 1-olefins, i.e. hydrocarbons having a double bond at the end of a hydrocarbon chain. The dimerization reaction is normally carried out by contacting the 1-olefin with a dimerization catalyst. One known procedure utilizes for instance 1-decene and subjects it to an oligomerization in which dimers, trimers, and tetramers are produced with respectively 20, 30 and 40 carbon atoms in the molecule. One problem in this process is that a significant portion of each of these oligomers is produced and that the products therefore have a fairly wide spread of molecular weight.